If Ingolf Rossberg, the mayor of Dresden, has his way, the white rose will become as significant a symbol in Germany as the red poppy is in Britain. The expectation is that tomorrow, the 60th anniversary of the night in which the RAF created the raging inferno that killed around 35,000 people, a vast crowd will turn out, wearing white roses and carrying candles. That will be Dresden's answer to the minority who hanker for strong rightwing rule, who believe that Dresden and not Auschwitz was the real Holocaust and who have now made it into the state parliament of Saxony.

The extremist National party of Germany (NPD) is no stronger here than the BNP is in parts of England. In France and other parts of Europe the far right is much stronger, but even here they won some parliamentary seats. This is unsurprising, with unemployment in eastern Germany running at over 20%. Nor is it surprising that, given Germany's history, sensitivity to the danger is far greater here than elsewhere. So great is the consternation that the other parties are almost panic-stricken and are beginning to blame each other. In the shadow of Auschwitz, Germany has been inoculated against neo-nazism as no other place has.

The white rose is a rich symbol. Lovers send them. They are laid at the graves of loved ones. Sophie Scholl, the Munich student who started an anti-Hitler group and was hanged for it, chose the white rose as the group's symbol. So it now signifies courage. I dare to think the rose might even take on meaning beyond Germany's frontiers.

To come to this city as it remembers the burning pyres of February 1945, on behalf of its twin city Coventry, is to come with mixed emotions. These are even more complex for me. As a child who fled Hitler, I remember my grandmother - a victim of the real Holocaust. In an address to the people of Dresden, representing Coventry cathedral, I shall remind people of Coventry's provost who, six weeks after the blitz of 1940, preached a sermon in the ruins of his cathedral in which he rejected all thoughts of revenge. He declared that when the war was over he would work with those who had been enemies "to build a kinder, more Christ-like kind of world". The people of Coventry at that time shook their heads. It didn't fit in with a world in which popular opinion had it that the only good Hun was a dead Hun.

The provost meant what he said, even though it was in total contrast to the relentless logic of total war. Today most Germans readily accept that it was they who sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. The war that devastated half of Europe was Hitler's war. Yet even Churchill acknowledged in a memo to the Air Ministry that the raid on Dresden and others like it were acts of terror that should be stopped, "even though we call it by another name".

Here no such charges will be brought on any public platform. There is no sign of bitterness; only grief at what was, grief that now extends to Grozny and Falluja, grief at the policies that, after Dresden, turned the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ashes. Among the most poignant moments will be when wreaths are laid at the cemetery where the ashes of the unknown thousands are buried, one of them by the British ambassador, another by the American ambassador. The RAF had come by night; the USAAF in the two days that followed. But this will be about far more than that tragic event. Russia will be represented and people will remember the 35 million Soviet people who died in Hitler's war and the 45 years of Soviet occupation here. Such are the complexities of history that people will remember that President Putin was once chief of the KGB bureau in Dresden.

On this historic February 13, Dresden's famous Lutheran cathedral, the Frauenkirche, destroyed and now rebuilt with the help of the British Dresden Trust, will receive the cross of nails - Coventry's symbol of forgiveness and reconciliation - from the dean of Coventry cathedral. The Frauenkirche will join a worldwide network that was born in Coventry and is committed to working for peace. It will recall the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Coventry in 1990. The address then was given by Richard von Weizsäcker, president of Germany, who brought with him a peace bell as a gift from the German people. He received from the Queen Mother a cross of nails which is now in the museum of German Democracy in Berlin. Reconciliation was now history.

Even if the far right manage to make headlines, Dresden's commemoration will have tolerance - in the spirit of the white rose - at its core. There will be tears by those old enough to remember, but the message to the generation of their grandchildren will transcend those tears with the simple words of eyewitness Nora Lang: "Just remember one thing: say no to war!"

· Canon Paul Oestreicher is the former director of the Centre for International Reconciliation, Coventry cathedral; he is in Dresden on behalf of Coventry cathedral and the city of Coventry, and as a trustee of the Dresden Trust